


Traps For Troubadors

by karaokegal



Category: Apocalypse Now (1979)
Genre: Gen, References to Drugs, Vietnam War, Yuletide, Yuletide 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 20:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8860126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karaokegal/pseuds/karaokegal
Summary: Kurtz's death wasn't the end at all.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Liviania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liviania/gifts).



> Thanks to my recipient for a great prompt and the opportunity to spend more time with the characters from one of my favorite films. 
> 
> Thank you to my awesome Beta, [Topaz_Eyes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Topaz_Eyes/pseuds/Topaz_Eyes), for moral support and for saving me from some rather egregious and potentially embarrassing errors.

The debriefing took longer than the whole goddamn mission had.

I was flown out of Saigon, with a cast still on my leg, and I didn’t get antibiotics for that nasty parasite leftover from the river until I’d been hand-delivered to a private room at Walter Reed, where they could keep me safe from myself while they tried to figure out what the hell had actually happened after they sent me to find Kurtz and terminate his command. 

By the time I was off my crutches, I’d told the story so often I was starting to wonder if it had really happened, or if I’d imagined the whole thing in a drunken haze. How many times did they want to hear it? How many times did I have to say it? At some point it occurred to me that the more I told them, the less they believed me.

Kurtz had wanted his story told; sadly, no one wanted to hear it. 

I was ready to crawl out a window and go on a bender that would leave me in a brig and might put a couple of MPs in the ER, when the brass upped the ante by sending in my ex-wife. 

Sheila showed up in a micro-mini, complete with a cock-and-bull story about not actually signing the divorce papers. If this was a test to make sure I was still functioning below the waist, I was about to pass with flying colors. As she crawled into the bed with me, I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass if the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff walked in. Since they didn’t, I had to assume we were being left alone for a reason. That’s when I realized what was going on. This wasn’t a debriefing; it was a negotiation. They wanted to know what it would cost to keep my mouth shut.

My opening bid was for the house in Georgetown that Sheila had always wanted, a cushy job at the Pentagon, and a promotion to go with it. The CIA guy pretending to be an Army Staff Sergeant actually looked relieved.

I didn’t want any of that crap for myself, but it was the least I could do for being such a lousy husband. The shell I’d become was a hopeless case and I wouldn’t last long in the gilded cage, but Sheila would be happy and taken care of when I did go off the deep end for the last time. 

I told myself I was doing one last decent thing for the ones I hadn’t been able to save. Chef, Clean, Lance. Even that moron with the camera who nearly got me killed. I ignored Kurtz’s voice in my head describing me in one succinct word that I couldn’t completely disagree with, a word which stung much more than “killer.” 

The morning I was scheduled to be released from the hospital and sign the papers that would seal the deal, I dressed in the clean uniform that had been delivered the day before and waited for some mid-level functionary to arrive with the documents.

There was a knock at the door, followed by the last person I expected to see, maybe the last person I wanted to see, especially with a gun in his hand and the madness of a true believer in his eyes. They’d cleaned him up and put new clothes on, but he was still clearly batshit crazy. Of all the people to get out of that jungle alive… 

He was armed, but I was dangerous. I needed to try to talk him down, at least long enough to take him out with whatever lethal implements were in my hospital room. I started calculating the possibilities of both of us surviving the encounter and it didn’t look good. 

They weren’t going to make me a general after all.  
@@@@@

He’d measured out his life with coffee spoons. 

Before he called himself a musician, a junkie or a photojournalist, the world called him a Hollywood brat. The house he grew up in cleaved to a steep slope at the base of Bird Streets just above the Sunset Strip. His mother held salons for some of Hollywood’s best preserved ladies and the gentlemen who preferred their company to that of their designated starlet wives and girlfriends. . Mom would give him a cup of “coffee” that was mostly milk and sugar, along with his own special spoon to stir it with. 

After he’d fallen down his own personal rabbit hole (and well, well beyond) he realized that most of them were wasted on whatever their well-dressed quacks would prescribe or what they could score from the less stylish hangers-on and bottom feeders who waited for fallen stars and their offspring like something slithering in the La Brea Tar Pits.

When pretending to study literature lost its appeal, he headed for San Francisco. He got to Haight Street late enough to find empty dreams and hippie girls who’d put out, but it all came at a cost. The spoons were still there, being ruined in the flames, as surely as he’d be ruined if he stayed there.

When mom called, begging him to come home, offering money for a plane ticket and full of plans to get him into the same sanitarium that had dismally failed to do his father any good during his multiple attempts to dry out, he’d quoted Eliot at her: _“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”_

Why bother living when there was nothing to live for? But how could he die when he hadn’t accomplished anything? There had to be something he was good at. It sure as hell wasn’t music, no matter how much he loved it. 

From the safety of a hospital bed, he saw it clearly. Life had been pulling him toward his destiny, toward Kurtz. 

The Nikon F survived his father’s debauched yacht adventures into increasingly turbulent international water and arrived special delivery from Hollywood. He actually cursed the annoyance of having to drag himself to the door to sign for a package. He’d been one bag away from hocking the thing for dope.

Instead, he sold his last guitar and kept the camera, taking it to gigs around town. No one wanted to hear him play, but he still got invites, based on the famous name and a reputation for being an entertaining fool under the influence, especially once he added LSD to his repertoire. 

He took pictures and since he was willing to sell them cheaply, the free papers published them. Next thing you know he was getting calls from _Life_ and _Time_ and _Newsweek_. 

They wanted him to go to Viet Nam, just when every sane person he knew was running in the opposite direction. They didn’t know just how insane he was by that point, or maybe they did and figured if he was crazy enough to go, they might as well subsidize the madness and see what they could get out of it.

Now he was coming down from the trip. From all the trips. Whether it was his original stash of Acid or the various intoxicants on offer in the jungle itself, or the highest of highs he’d experienced in the presence of his Lord, his Master, his Guru, yeah, he’d go ahead and say it, his motherfucking GOD, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.

Down was relative, of course.

The lights, the sounds, the colors were all gone, but there was a needle in his arm, and the world around him was sweet and cool. Morphine. Good quality. Trust a junkie to know.

He’d run away…no, man, he wasn’t a coward, he had to survive to spread the word. He was Kurtz’s Apostle, wasn’t he? That’s why he’d denied his Lord three times, run into the jungle, seen the flames and tried to get back, only to get caught in the crossfire. He should have died. Maybe he had. Maybe this was heaven and he’d spend eternity tripping the light fandango. There was a time that would have been bliss. 

They let him float in his opiate bubble a little longer…hours, days. Who knew, who cared? Kurtz was gone. 

“Son?” 

Had he said “Son,” or “Sean?” It had been a long time since he’d been called anything other than the various insults and epithets that Kurtz pummeled him with. He’d almost forgotten that he had a real name or that he’d ever been anyone’s child. 

He opened his eyes, slowly, tentatively, fearful of light and life and what it meant if he really was alive. Not dad, thank God. Not God either, because he knew the face of God. He’d seen the beauty encased in flesh. The head shaved bald to eliminate all pretension and vanity. The purity of spirit glowing in every pore. 

This was just some sad-eyed mook looking at him like he was a specimen. 

Whoever had taken him out of the jungle and stitched him back together wanted something. They wanted to know about Kurtz. He’d give them nothing. He was not Judas. 

Kurtz had been preparing for this from the moment he’d ridden into the camp on a Harley Davidson, stoned on weed and bravado, with a self-created assignment to find and photograph the soldier that Sordo, his army-assigned handler, had called “the meanest motherfucker in the valley.” 

Sordo didn’t make it past the first volley of arrows. The Photojournalist thought he hadn’t either, until he woke up in a darkened room with a pounding headache. He could hardly breathe through the mixture of sweat, jungle and incense that permeated the room. The first thing he heard was that voice…powerful, deep, caressing and yet somehow already detached from everything.

“Are you a spy?” 

“I’m a photographer.”

“You’re neither. You’re a child with a coloring book who thinks he’s Picasso.”

He thought he’d be killed then and there. The pause went on so long, he thought he could hear every single insect in the freaking jungle along with his own shallow breathing and the deep exhalation of Colonel Kurtz, as he continued his Lotus pose and considered what to do with him.

Introductions might be in order. 

“Pleased to meet you, Colonel. I’m Sean…

“SHUT UP!” Kurtz bellowed. Not for the last time either… Then more softly….”I might be able to use you.” 

His first instinct was a giant “Fuck you, man,” which he managed to squelch out of both terror and curiosity.

“Uh, how? What? I mean…you know…I can take pictures, let the world know what’s going on out here. The real stuff, not that canned crap on nightly news.”

This time Kurtz didn’t need to shout. The glare was enough.

“Or whatever you need.”

Kurtz gave a nod to one of the uniformed guards who hovered around the room exuding silent menace, and he was taken away none too gently, once again assuming he’d breathed his last and wondering if it would be painful or not.

Instead he ended up sharing a hut with two of those crazy tribal guys. They never said anything to him, so he kept talking to them just to keep himself sane. Any shit he could think of, from rock bands he knew in San Francisco to poems he’d studied at Duke. He didn’t bother telling them his name. It wouldn’t mean anything to them. Kurtz had made it clear that it didn’t mean anything to anyone. 

Kurtz might be training him or keeping him as a pet. Either way it was more interest than anyone had shown him before, including his parents.

The first morning, he was woken up and shoved out in the early dawn where Kurtz’s soldiers were half naked and doing exercises. Their bodies dripped with sweat and the photojournalist was aware of his own sad physique. Then it occurred to him that he needed to live this life. Become one of them. A few jumping jacks had him winded and he could barely do one push-up. He took a few pictures and staggered back to the hut, where he found Kurtz waiting for him. 

This time he didn’t bother saying anything. He sat in a squat and he listened. Listened hard. Kurtz was saying shit about the war, about war in general that no one else was saying. He tried to remember it all, but the words pelted him like the jungle rain. Kurtz asked him questions, but any attempts to actually answer them resulted in a barrage of insults. 

He lost track of time. Days and nights blended into periods of training and lessons. Eventually he was allowed to accompany the men on raids, where he took pictures of the carnage they left behind. He was never quite sure what the point of the destruction was, but if Kurtz ordered it, there must be a reason. His was not to question, but to document. It was the one thing he could do that Kurtz actually appreciated. The first time they sat over a vat of developer and the images of blood and destruction appeared, he basked in the pleasure that illuminated Kurtz’s face, as though he were an alchemist who’d actually be able to fulfill the king’s wish for gold from base metals. The darkroom was primitive, but it became his home. 

When he left the compound, he’d taken only the Nikon and a briefcase of undeveloped film, including the very last pictures he’d taken there, the ones of Judas, the man who killed his lord.

Fuck.

Better yet, “Fuck!”

That felt good. He needed to talk. To hear his own voice again. To remember that he was somebody. That Kurtz wanted his story told. Or did he? What was bearing witness and what was telling tales? 

He opened his eyes again and took a good look around. The mook was still there, prepared to take notes. He’d give them something to write down. 

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.  
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

The idiot dutifully jotted down his words. Probably wouldn’t know the difference between TS Eliot and DH Lawrence. 

_“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”_

“I see.”

“You don’t see at all. How could you, man? You know nothing. I was there. I saw it all. I know the truth and you can’t handle it. I’m here to testify, to bear witness, to give it all back to see the truth.”

“What happened to Colonel Kurtz?” 

“You can’t judge him. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand. He knows there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all.” 

“Sean…”

“" _I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas_ …What? What did you say?”

They did know his name. Who he was. What he was. Fuckfuckfuckfuck…

He heard himself crying like a hurt, lost child. If his father had ever heard him cry like that there would have been taunting for his weakness, all in the most dismissive tone possible. Or worse yet, nothing, because his father wouldn’t have been there. 

And yet, farther back, beyond his own agony and sorrow, before he’d come so close to dying, behind the place he’d wanted to stifle with the drugs, he felt, rather than heard, the voice in the wilderness that had brought him comfort. 

He’d been out training with Kurtz’s men, both the soldiers and the Montagnards, and even after weeks in the jungle, running through the humidity, carrying a heavy pack, eating army rations that turned his stomach and occasionally feasting on the local game killed by the natives, he still felt like a weak-assed dope-fiend pussy. He could shoot a great picture, but practicing drills with an M16 left him aching and winded and he hated himself and wanted to get high and wanted to chuck it all and go back to Saigon or go home and be his momma’s little boy again, stirring sweetened coffee with his monogrammed spoon. It all came out of him, literally, at Kurtz’s feet and he expected to be ridiculed with a vengeance, as only Kurtz was able to do. Possibly he’d even be thrown out of the camp, which as much as he wanted to go home, was actually his worst nightmare. 

Kurtz had let him cry out his misery and when he was finally spent and ready for whatever punishment could be dispensed for his weakness, he felt a powerful, yet benevolent hand caressing the top of his head.

Then came Kurtz’s breath close to his ear, the voice that told him he was still a beloved child. 

“ _Illegitimi non carborundum._ ” 

The man who’d been born Sean Flynn and survived to become the Photojournalist and was now only Kurtz’s Apostle, stopped being a weak-assed pussy and remembered that he had been trained by a Warrior Poet and he had only one job now. 

He answered the question.

“Some bastard killed him.” 

“This one?”

The mook was suddenly a sharp-eyed operative with a folder of pictures, the prints of his last roll of film. It had still been in the camera when he hot-footed it out of camp ahead of the coming disaster. 

They showed him the soldier who’d come looking for Kurtz. There’d been others of course. Kurtz had either killed or converted all of them. Until this last one. Surprisingly young, he remembered, with a steely eye and husky voice. He’d wanted to warn Kurtz that this was the most dangerous of all, but he wouldn’t listen. He was like a soothsayer. _Et tu, Brute!_ His mind kept wandering; Sister Morphine was robbing him of clarity. 

“Yeah, him.” 

“Did you see this man terminate the Colonel?”

He shook his head. He’d only seen the aftermath. 

“So much blood!” He thought he might cry again. Or just be sick. 

“Flynn!” the man barked, and he managed to snap back to the level of attention he could achieve in his supine state. 

“Yeah?”

“Colonel Walter E. Kurtz was one of the finest military men this country has ever produced.”

“He was a warrior poet, man!” 

“And this man, Willard, destroyed him. “

“He had no right!” 

They had achieved a unity of purpose, a silent agreement. The euphoria of self-righteousness lasted even after the crisply clad angel in white, arrived to gently detach him from the IV. Time passed until he had the clarity to see what was going to be asked of him. He felt nauseated and yet honored. 

His legs were wobbly the first time he tried to stand and his hands shook when the gun was placed in them. The pistol seemed tiny after the rifle he’d trained with in the jungle. His new best friend, who’d finally identified himself as Dr. Feinstein, offered something to calm his nerves and he accepted. He’d never really been a pill guy, but Mom had always kept a stash that would have been envy of half the pill-heads he knew on Polk Street, and he dabbled a few times. Mother’s little helper. The Stones sure had that one right. 

Feinstein walked him around the hospital grounds every day for what seemed like weeks until he was cleared for take-off on his Kamikaze mission. 

He started to write a letter to his mother, but gave up. In the end, the words failed him; even Eliot Only Kurtz would understand. Enough of Mom’s Catholicism must have stuck for him to hope there might be a “Well done” once he’d finished. He didn’t think he’d live long afterwards, but it didn’t matter. 

Bathed, shaved and out of his gourd on Valium, the Photojournalist chuckled as he tasted the fresh air of a crisp Virginia autumn day, knowing it might be his last day of freedom, or even life. The biggest joke of all was that he’d been a mile away from that bastard the whole time.

Yeah, it was one fucking giggle. He could have been so many things. He wanted to be a singer, a poet, a scholar, a lover and now here he was, finally ready to fulfill his destiny by being a killer. 

_What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from._

Kurtz would be avenged. 

@@@@@

You meet Lucas at the rooftop bar of the Rex hotel. He’s nursing a scotch and staring into the hopelessly beautiful colors of a Saigon sunset. He looks relaxed and as content as these desk jockey types are allowed to. You almost feel sorry for him. He wasn’t crazy about sending a man in to take out one of their own, but at least it was over and done. Or so everybody thought. Lucas has a folder in front of him. It probably has Willard’s account, plus whatever it’s going to take to keep him happy long enough for the stench to blow over.

You have a folder too. It’s got pictures. One picture, in particular: a picture of Willard that shouldn’t exist, taken by a man who was thought to be dead over a year ago.

“Make mine a double.”

He already knows something’s wrong. Folders are exchanged and you see a little light die in his hazel eyes.

“Fuck!” he announces succinctly. “What the hell happened?”

“Failure of intelligence.” 

“Well isn’t that supposed to be your department? The General is NOT going to be happy.” 

He’s using a hoarse whisper that may as well be a hysterical shriek. 

“Keep your pants on, Lucas. You can tell the General that the problem is being contained.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, downing the rest of his drink, with a profound lack of respect for good Scotch. 

“The problem is under close observation in Bethesda.” He absorbs that, but doesn’t see the rest coming. “Tell Willard he gets everything he wants.“ Now he’s completely confused. “Our photographer friend is being prepped for his own special assignment. He has a vendetta to fulfill. “

“You’re sending a hopped up lunatic against a cold-blooded killer,” Lucas says, shaking his head, and he signals for another drink. 

You can’t tell if it’s disgust or admiration curling his lips, but you end up sharing an ironic clink of glasses, as you seal two fates.

The army hates loose ends.


End file.
